Hacker News Reader

That line was exactly where I lost interest as well.

This author is stating that Facebook should make it's own decisions about harmful content, and that facebook should ALSO be accountable to some other entity for those decisions (presumably the government, but who fucking knows based on the content of the article...). While happily saying that creating any sort of governmental guidance on that issue is "a legal and ethical minefield".

That's bullshit. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either create guidelines that steer company decisions here and apply them, or accept that companies will make decisions that do not match the author's idea of morality.

You cannot judge a company without setting standards. You cannot let a company judge itself and expect them to make the decisions you think are correct.

Well, legal accountability isn't the only kind of accountability. This is Bloomberg we're talking about, after all. This article links to their piece criticizing GDPR, which they say is all wrong because the solution to privacy problems is "transparent pricing and more competition".

So I think maybe what they're saying here is that Facebook needs to exercise judgement and be accountable to the market.

I don't think I really agree with them, but it's a coherent, internally consistent point, and on-brand for Bloomberg.

Yeah I don't buy that part either. The problem is inherently hard and pushing the responsibility for policing content to a corporation is not okay. As a specific example, I was listening to a podcast I was listening to earlier that was dealing with how Facebook filters content (I think radiolab). I'm para-phrasing heavily since it's been a while since I heard the show, but I think I got the gist of it right.

- There was a violet attack in Mexico against a journalist by some drug cartel and a random body part (leg or an arm or a head or whatever) was chopped off and posted on social media by the cartel. The people protesting cartel violence picked this image up and were using this image as a part of their protest. Facebook's censors allowed it until the image popped up on some school kid's feed in America / England and all sorts of outcry later, it was removed from the site as a violet image.

- The boston marathon bombing happened and gruesome images of people lying on the floor with limbs strewn about started getting shared on the site. Facebook's policy at this point specifically said no violent images on the site so they got blocked by the censors. Media picked this up and raised an outcry on how facebook was censoring these images and basically someone high up said 'leave it up or else' and the images were allowed on the site.

This is clearly hipocrisy and there's no right answer here. Traumatizing school children with violent imagery they didn't even want to see is not great while the Boston marathon bombing was a significant political event in America and those images didn't deserve to get silenced.

This ends up being a question of free-speech and what sorts of content Americans were okay with. There are no right answers and I believe the govt. definitely should step in and provide guidelines here.

The disingenuous thing is using this as an example of how Facebook is okay with govt regulation while resisting any regulation around things that can hurt them like any number of their privacy mishaps, shady 3p data markets and ad tech in general.

This was a good episode and really showcased how the standards were forced to evolve by various stakeholders (protestors, execs, govt, etc).

I think I recall one them pointing out that a lot of challenges came from Facebook trying to be everything for everybody.

Moderating content so people don't get pictures of Boston Marathon gore next to their grandkids' photos is problem they made for themselves.

>This is clearly hipocrisy and there's no right answer here.

There is a lot of hypocrisy going on, but this doesn't mean there is no right answer or that the right answer is to invite government fucking censors to control everything.

There are pretty obvious things platforms can do:

1. Instead of opaque algorithms, give people control over what they see.

2. Either do bare legal minimum of moderation or create clear, exhaustive, stable and unambiguous rules for which content is and is not allowed on the platform. Once the rules are set, take a stand and abide by them in all cases.

>Why is deciding what speech / UGC should be allowed in social media a 'corporate responsibility' such that letting the government or some 'impartial' NGO arbitrate this a bad thing?

Because there is far more freedom to reject a corporation than the government (the NGO would depend upon how it interacts with the government). NGOs and governments are susceptible to bias, and while they may be less susceptible than a private corporation, they have far stronger enforcement of what ever bias they do have (once again assuming the NGOs are somehow working with government, if not then this only applies to government).

Take for example someone determining what is allowed to be printed in a book. Let's go back about two or three decades, so during the timeframe when most of us were alive even if not at all aware of politics, when social norms and even laws enforced views that we would find objectionable today.

Now, consider two possibilities. One, corporations decides what isn't allowed and thus chooses to ban any pro-LGBT content. Two, government decides what isn't allowed and thus chooses to ban any pro-LGBT content. Which is better?

In my mind, the corporate ban is far better because it is much easier for other smaller corporations to be started that will publish pro-LGBT content. As social norms change, corporate enforcement of morals give rise to more freedom.

Perhaps an even better example that is still relevant today instead of a few decades ago: according to the federal government marijuana has no medical benefits.

I'd rather lawmakers not be making any more laws that further restrict my freedoms.

> Why is deciding what speech / UGC should be allowed in social media a 'corporate responsibility' such that letting the government or some 'impartial' NGO arbitrate this a bad thing

Government arbitrating speech is what First Amendment explicitly bans. And I think there's a reason why it's the First - if the government controls the speech, then it controls election of the next government, and so on - so it pretty much ends the democracy or at least severely limits it.

NGOs can already arbitrate anything they want - as long as it is voluntary to listen to them. There are many NGOs that already issue their opinions about speech. As long as it is not mandatory - it's fine and already exists. As soon as it starts to be mandatory - see above.

> Why do you want corporations to 'exercise judgement' and to be accountable (to the state? to journalists?) if you also don't want there to be some formal guidelines about what is or isn't allowed on social media?

Corporations already exercise judgement and always had. But so far there was freedom for every corporation to exercise whatever judgement they have, either good or astonishingly bad (as in case of Facebook) and for the users to choose if they want to deal with this corporation or another one. Introduction of the government in the equation kills it.

> there to be some formal guidelines about what is or isn't allowed on social media?

In the US, one of the basics of limitations put by the people on the government is that government, outside of the very narrow task of preventing imminent crime, does not get to say what is or isn't allowed to be said.